Heartfelt, passionate and slick—an essential hip-hop book.
Hip-hop’s renaissance man drops a classic.
Lyricist, producer, business mogul and self-proclaimed hustler Jay-Z has all but dominated the rap scene since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt. During the last decade-plus, his singles have not only owned the urban airwaves, but have crossed over into the mainstream. This book provides a two-pronged attack, in which narrative chapters alternate with in-depth explanations of the lyrics to his favorite compositions. Not formatted in chronological fashion, Jay-Z’s stories ramble pleasantly from one topic to the next, including his difficult childhood in the projects, his road to creative fulfillment, his encounters with A-list celebrities and public figures and how he deals with the ins and outs of the record industry. Hardcore hip-hop heads will be drawn in by Jay-Z’s obvious love, respect and knowledge of his chosen genre. In fact, his incisive reminiscences of the lives and/or music of Run-DMC, Big Daddy Kane, the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur are alone worth the price of admission. Though engaging, his meticulous dissections of his lyrics could be off-putting to the casual fan, but that’s mitigated by the fact that his complex personality shines through every page. One minute, he’s boasting as if he’s in the midst of a rap battle with his pal Eminem, and the next he’s chiding himself for a minor musical, personal or business transgression. The book is creatively designed, filled with pull quotes, sidebars and photographs. Ardent Jay-Z followers may be disappointed by the lack of gossip—there’s no mention of his infamous battle with fellow New York rapper Nas; the specifics of his thug life are thin; and there’s nary a word about his wife, Beyonce—but the sharpness of his social observations and his palpable adoration for all that is hip-hop make this a must-have title for all pop-culture aficionados.
Heartfelt, passionate and slick—an essential hip-hop book.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6892-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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